The field of the present invention is fruit juice extracting machines.
Presently, there is much emphasis worldwide on fresh single strength citrus juice, as opposed to juices made from concentrate. Fresh juices are typically not pasteurized and do not include preservatives. Consequently, sanitation in processing citrus juices is very important. To obtain adequate shelf life with fresh juices, bacteria in the juice must be kept at a low level. However, juice extracting machines are often run for e.g., 24 hours or more before they are stopped and cleaned. This allows stagnant juice and pulp to accumulate, leading to increased bacteria in the juice. Juice and pulp can accumulate and stagnate on or in various internal components and spaces, and especially on horizontal areas, leading to excessive bacteria growth. Accordingly, processing fruit into fresh juice has required frequent stopping and cleaning the machines, e.g., every 8 hours, a time consuming and relatively costly but necessary procedure. Cleaning these machines has also required removal of covers or other parts and effort intensive hand cleaning.
A well known fruit juice extracting machine (Brown International Model 700) is shown and described in Wells, U.S. Pat. No. 2,631,625, incorporated herein by reference. This fruit juice extracting machine includes a vertically mounted rotary fruit feeder and hopper arranged to supply citrus fruit to holding cups on a pair of opposing endless cup chains. The feeder delivers fruit to the cups in the cup chain which move towards each other and carry the fruit through a halving knife. The sliced fruit halves are held into the cups by retainers or baffles as the fruit halves are moved to a reamer wheel at the front of the machine. The vertically mounted reamer wheel has a plurality of radially spaced apart spinning reamers. As the cups holding fruit halves approach the reamer wheel, they are guided towards each other by cup tracks and engage the spinning reamers, thereby extracting juice and pulp from the fruit halves. The juice and pulp fall towards to the bottom of the machine and collected and removed from the machine.
The peel remains in the cups until the cups move away from the reamer wheel to a peel chute where a peel ejector ejects the peel from the cups into the peel chute. The peel ejected into the peel chute are collected separately from the juice and pulp, to avoid degrading juice quality with bitter peel oils. After peel ejection, the cups continue to the fruit feeder near the back of the machine to recommence the loading, slicing, reaming and ejection cycle. Although highly successful, this machine can be difficult to clean, and it tends to allow some build up of stagnant juice or pulp. In addition, although highly efficient it has been found that some juice and pulp, released from the peels after entering the peel chute, is not recovered.
This well known fruit juice extracting machine in various embodiments and with various improvements is also shown and described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,631,625; 2,644,568; 3,342,314; 3,887,062; 4,421,021 and 4,759,938, also incorporated herein by reference.